Institutional Knowledge

1. Kendall Hall
2. Trinity Hall
3. Meriam Library
4. Performing Arts Center

I’m about to head out for Orlando to attend EDUCAUSE 08. While it will not technically be a presentation, I will be speaking in the Unicon booth about CAS, Thursday at 11am. If you can’t make it, here is the executive summary:

CAS is awesome.

So, there it is.

I will be trying to post as much as I can here and there will undoubtedly be some commentary on twitter.

I know that we normally cover the technical or statistical issues here at IK, but today our campus updated our “fact sheet” and the higher ed crowd always loves to see what’s going on “over there.”

Enjoy.

The end of year reports are being written and various folks have come to WEBD looking for what really happened on various systems. These numbers are based on our fiscal year which is from July 1st to June 30th.

University Home Page

• 2007/08 – 9,289,385 visits as defined by Google Analytics

Yearly Unique Portal Logins (based on daily logs)

• 2005/6 – 1,905,225
• 2006/7 – 2,215,433
• 2007/8 – 2,415,444

Yearly Total Portal Logins (based on daily logs)

• 2005/6 – 3,377,752
• 2006/7 – 4,089,277
• 2007/8 – 4,359,887

Random

These numbers are based on whatever date range we happen to have numbers for.

• We have 23 Spaces and 372 users in Confluence, our enterprise wiki.
• 1,492 JIRA issues were created in the 2007/8 fiscal year.
• 32,915 visits on January 29th, 2008 was our high water mark for the Portal
• Portal browser stats (9/21/2007 – 6/30/2008) IE 60.47%, Firefox 29.53%, Safari 9.6%
• Home page browser stats 2007/8 fiscal year – IE 76.18%, Firefox 23.47%, Safari 8.7%

Curious about anything else?

We have 23 campuses in the California State University system and I like to know what all of them are doing on their web sites. Sure, I could dig into the Way Back Machine, but I find that can give inconsistent results. Instead, I decided that I wanted to automate getting screenshots of all the CSU homepages. This requires some shell scripting, so I’m going to make a lot of assumptions about technical knowledge here. If you aren’t comfortable mucking around on the command line, this may not be the best solution for you.

1. Install webkit2png

If you are on 10.5, you won’t have to install anything but this script.

2. Script Your Shots

I’ve got a small shell script with an array of 23 URLs and a for loop that passes each one to webkit2png.

SITES=( http://www.csub.edu/
...
http://www.csustan.edu/ )

SITENUM="${#SITES[*]}"

for ((i=0;i< $SITENUM;i++)); do
   webkit2png -F -W 1024 -d -D /Users/pberry/Projects/csushots/ ${SITES[${i}]}
done

3. Profit!

From there, you could just cron the script up and let it run. The -d option will put the date in the filename, so you aren’t blowing away your archive of screen shots with each run. I decided it would be nice if I could organize these in iPhoto and I didn’t want to manually import my shots each time my script ran. I’m no good with AppleScript, so I turned to Automator.

I created a workflow that creates the directory, runs the shell script, imports them into iPhoto (iPhoto is set to copy on import) and then deletes the directory. The extra steps were really just to make the workflow happen. I’m guessing there is a way to do it without creating/deleting, but I was in a hurry. I then created a Smart Album based on the unique parts of the file names (by default webkit2png will use the URL for the filename) for each campus. Using iPhoto also lets me do “fun” stuff, like create movies showing how a page changes over time (QuickTime).

Now I’m able to spot trends and changes in our system. I could extent the process to grab other pages as well, but for now I’m okay with just the main page for each campus.

Caveats and Misc.

The webkit2png script can have trouble with Flash, so screenshot will look “unfinished” if they use a big Flash movie to show photos. /looks at Bakersfield

If you don’t have 10.5, you’ll have to install the PyObjC bridge. It sounds nasty, but it’s easy. Double-click and you’re on your way.

You could do the first two steps on linux with khtml2png.